Note: I was going through my GitHub branches and noticed this draft from 2023. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it, but I enjoyed reading it again, so I’m publishing it now!

2023 Toronto Election

The City of Toronto recently had it’s mayoral election with 102 candidates running. Only a few people actually stood a chance of winning, but I thought it would be unfair to the other 96 candidates who at least chose to run. So I randomly went through the list and checked out some random people’s platform. Oh boy, what a journey!

Actually some of them weren’t bad. Kris Langenfeld seemed to have a pretty coherent platform, but it went pretty downhill from there. Jody Williams is kinda all over the place - not making any promises but recognizing issues. Steve Mann gave me a flashback to college:

Reduce taxes and improve services by cutting costs. First on the price chopping block will be closed-source software and software licensing costs. By using free open-source computer programs in government, we’ll improve computer literacy, make things run more efficiently, save money, and boost jobs in Canada, Ontario, and Toronto. Rather than paying Microsoft license fees, we’ll create jobs for local computer engineers to adapt open-source alternatives to government needs.

Weizhen Tang is in “I wouldn’t trust this guy with money” territory:

Furthermore, Tang believes that the current Western financial and legal systems are not serving the people well, and that he has the necessary expertise to bring about positive change

a bit strange to put on a platform, but okay…

(not in the archive.org page) It was on a later wayback snapshot

I will make 10 Billion dollars for the city of Toronto in a year to replace all the property taxes and to cover free TTC by investing US equity index ETFs SPY and will Restore Trust, Preserve Culture and Passion. Bring happy life for Torontonians ，Wholeheartedly Serve the People of Toronto.

10 billion dollars! Apparently it can serve us with this kind of promise! Actually the Toronto budget was >16 billion so we’ll definitely have to work harder and hope for a super-bull market.

Still not the worst though. I would have to give that to John Letonja which thought out his platform I imagine, over drinks. His idea to solve Toronto’s money woes? Fastball!

The fastest way to make new money and the biggest money making projects for Toronto. I am going to make a new sports game called Fastball which the city of Toronto will own the team. Plus the name of the team will be called Torontomo which has 15 players on each side and…

oh boy. He’s really sold himself on this. He has a plan B in case he doesn’t win:

…if I don’t get elected as Mayor in Toronto I will need to get investors to help me to make it happen I need a football or a soccer stadium a field to play the game on starting small to a bigger stadium to see how many people are interested in the game…

He updated his page, still looking for investors! He looks to be willing to spend a lot of other people’s money to see whether it’ll catch on.

Oh but it gets better:

I like to sell our Toronto garbage and making by products from recycled waste

uhhh, yeah. no? We already sell our sell-able garbage (recycling!)

He wants to turn us all into farmers to get free food!

I am going use vacant land in city parks and open spaces for more farming growth for the people so we the people can have free food all the time even in winter just save your vegetable seeds or any seeds that you have when shopping for groceries

And we’ll all live in cheap shipping container

I would build or buy nice cheap shipping building containers like storage sheds for the city of Toronto that also can be made and built on site just by buying or making a crimping machine and a laser welders to build the housing unit which are fireproof for all over the city… I would say the cost to build one container housing unit is about $20.000 dollars for each housing unit more or less

And to help afford this places, he’s going to start bending arms at the Bank of Canada:

I want to rectify the Bank of Canada interest rate that is causing problems for everyone. By getting the bank of Canada to reduce Toronto interest rate for building Toronto infrastructures

He really needed an editor for this bit:

I am going to try to lower our interest rates that we can claim our mortgage payments on the interest rates that has more interest then your RRSP bank stocks paying out from the banks and if you want a little bit of your money you are taxed at 30% on $15,000 dollars and 20% on $10,000 and 10% for $5,000 if you have money in your bank account everyone should get $1,000 a month and $12,000 clear money a year from your own bank account without getting penalties so you can pay your mortgage or rent

That was one sentence.

His ideas around policing is a bit absurd:

I like the police to carry facial recognition scanners and to carry long range electromagnetic body scanners to see what kind of weapons a person is carrying and to carry a light dose of tranquillizer gun so no one gets mistakenly killed or beat up by the police if they extremely resist arrest but if the person gets tranquillized they will calm down or have a good sleep instead, and be easier to transport without the hassle

Tranquilizer guns! LONG RANGE ELECTROMAGNETIC BODY SCANNERS. Still though, that “good sleep” sounds enticing.

A number of years ago, I brought a foo.bar.name domain - otherwise known as a third-level domain. The .name domain is bit unusual as it is meant for personal use. Because lots of people share the same last time, it’s pretty common that second-level domains like bar.name to be reserved. In many cases, you can only register third-level domains.

Sometime in 2023 my registrar, Gandi, got acquired and they raised their prices. Annoyed, I’ve been trying to transfer my .name out (along with my other domains), but this was turning into a giant headache!

Many registrars do not support .name domains. Of those that do, almost none of them support third-level .name domains. Not Namecheap (confirmed via support), not dynadot, not… ughhh, GoDaddy.

webnames does support third-level domains, but at a more expensive price than Gandi 🤷 and at roughly 3x the cost of Namecheap 💰

In the process, I learned that Namecheap competes with itself, but Spaceship doesn’t even support .name domains.

Ultimately I decided to just ditch the .name domain. Thankfully I don’t use it for many things (even though it’s my favourite domain)

As an aside, one option I did consider was registering foobar.name instead. But I really like the foo.bar.name format.

The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sunny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music. While he was playing, a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out, ‘Do you call that music?’ Sunny was delighted with her response and told the story for years afterwards as evidence of the healing powers of music.

- From the Sun Ra album Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy